Reply to BC on the Course of History

IR
– 50 3rd quarter 1987

Polemic: Reply to Battaglia Comunista

The course of history

Since 1968, the
revolutionary groups which have come to form the ICC have been arguing that the
international wave of workers’ struggles which began in France that year marked
a new period in the balance of forces between bourgeoisie and proletariat: the
ending of the long period of counter-revolution which followed the reflux of
the 1917-23 revolution wave; the opening up of a course towards generalised was
class confrontations. While the accelerating collapse of the capitalist economy
could not fail to push the bourgeoisie towards another world war, this same
economic disintegration was provoking a vigorous resistance by a new and
undefeated generation of workers. Consequently, capitalism cannot go to war
without first crushing the proletariat; on the other hand, the growing
combativity and consciousness of the proletariat is inevitably leading to huge
class battles whose outcome will determine whether the crisis of capitalism is
to end in world war or world revolution.

This vision of the
historic course is not shared by many groups in the proletarian political
milieu, in particular by the main international current outside the ICC, the
International Bureau for a Revolutionary Party. After a long period in which
the IBRP’s seemed to have little or no interest in debating with the ICC, we
can only welcome the recent contribution on this question in Battaglia
Comunista, the publication of the IBRP’s affiliate in Italy, the Internationalist
Communist Party (‘The ICC and the Historic Course: A Mistaken Method’ in BC
No 3, March ’ 87, published in English in Communist Review No
5). Not simply because the text contains passages indicating that BC is
waking up to certain realities of the present world situation – in particular
the end of the counter-revolution and the“signs” , at least, of a resurgence of class struggle. But also because,
even where the text is fundamentally wrong, it does take us straight to the
essential issues: the problem of the marxist method in grasping the unfolding
of reality; the conditions for unleashing a new world war; the real level of
class struggle today, and the approach to these problems taken by our common
political ancestor, the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left in the 1930s and
1940s.

THE MARXIST METHOD:
INDICATING THE LINE OF MARCH OR AGNOSTICISM?

In IR 36 we
published another polemic with BC on the question of the historic course
(‘The Course of History: the ‘80s are not the ‘30s’). A text emanating from BC’s
5th congress had affirmed that it was not possible to say whether the social
storms stirred up by the crisis would break out before, during or after a world
imperialist war. In our reply, as well as in a basic text on the historic course
emanating from our third congress in 1979 (see IR 18) , we argued that
it is a fundamental and crucial task of revolutionaries to indicate the general
lines in which social events are moving. It is a pity that BC’s text
doesn’t really address itself to these arguments. Indeed, it does little more
than quote again the passage which we criticised at such length in IR 36! But
in another part of the article, BC does at least try to explain why it
feels it necessary to maintain an agnostic attitude about the historic course,
and, rather than simply repeating all the arguments contained in our other two
articles, we will address ourselves to this new ‘explanation’ . This is how BC
poses the problem: “In relation to the problem the ICC has set us of being
precise prophets of the future the difficulty lies in the fact that
subjectivity does not mechanically follow objective movements. Although we can
precisely follow tendencies, possible counter-tendencies and their reciprocal
relations in the structures of the economic world, this is not the case for the
subjective world, neither for the bourgeoisie nor the proletariat. No-one can
believe that the maturation of consciousness, even the most elementary class
consciousness, can be rigidly determined from observable, rationally correlated
data.”

It’s perfectly true that
subjective factors are not mechanically determined by objective ones, and that,
consequently, it is not possible to make exact predictions of the time and
place of proletarian outbursts. But this does not mean that marxism
historically has confined itself to predicting only the trends in the
capitalist economy.

On the contrary: in the Communist
Manifesto Marx and Engels defined the communists as those who were
able to see the “line of march” of the “movement going on in front of our eyes”
the movement of the proletariat. And throughout their careers they
attempted to put this theoretical proposition into practice, closely aligning
their organisational activity to the perspectives they traced for the class
struggle (stressing the necessity for theoretical reflection after the defeats
of the 1848 revolutions, for the formation of the 1st and 2nd Internationals in
periods of class revival, and so on). Sometimes they were proved wrong, and
they were obliged to revise their predictions, but they never abandoned the
effort to be the most far-sighted elements of the proletariat. Similarly, the
intransigently revolutionary positions adopted by Lenin in 1914 and in 1917
were based on an unshakable confidence that the ‘objective’ horrors of the
imperialist war were giving rise to a profound maturation in the class
consciousness of the proletariat. And when the Italian Fraction in the 1930s
insisted so strongly on basing its whole activity on a proper analysis of the
historic course, it was merely following on in the same tradition.

And what applies to the
broader historical dimension also applies to the immediate struggle; in order
to be able to intervene concretely in a strike movement, communists must
develop the capacity to assess and reassess the momentum and direction of the
struggle.

Having to deal with
‘subjective’ factors has never prevented marxists from carrying out this
essential work.

THE CONDITIONS FOR
GENERALISED WAR TODAY

The ICC has always
maintained that, in order to march the proletariat off to a new world war,
capitalism requires a situation expressed in “the workers’ growing adherence to capitalist values (and to their
political and trade union representatives) and a combativity which either tends
to disappear, or appears within a political perspective totally controlled by
the bourgeoisie,” (‘The Course of History: the ‘80s are not the ‘30s, IR
36).

Unwilling, perhaps, to
go on insisting (as they have done in the past) that the proletariat today is still
groaning under the ideological heel of the counter-revolution, BC comes
up with a novel response to this: “...the
form of war, its technical means, its tempo, its characteristics in relation to
the population as a whole, has greatly changed since 1939. More precisely, war
today has less need for consensus or working class passivity than the wars of
yesteryear. Here we must make it clear that we are not theorising the complete
separation of the ‘military’ and the ‘civil’ which are, especially on the level
of production, intersecting more and more. Rather, we wish to put the speed and
high technical content of warfare in relation to its economic, political and
social background. The relation is such that involvement in the actions of war
is possible without the agreement of the proletariat. Every bourgeoisie is able
to rely on its victory for the re-establishing of consensus as well as for the
other things that victory brings: occupation of territory, etc. And it is
obvious that every bourgeoisie enters a war thinking of victory.”

Reading this passage, it
is difficult to understand what BC is talking about. The above
conditions could be applied to very limited imperialist adventure, such as the
various raids and expeditions the west has carried out in the Middle east,
though even these actions have to be accompanied by intense ideological
campaigns to dull the proletariat’s awareness of what is being done. But we are
talking not about limited or local actions, but a world war, a third world
war in a century whose wars have been ever-more global – embracing
the entire planet – and total – demanding the active cooperation and
mobilisation of the entire population. Is BC seriously suggesting that
World War 3 could be fought with professional armies on some ‘distant’
battlefield, and that the accompanying ‘intersection’ of the civil and military
sectors would not involve imposing the most monstrous sacrifices on the entire
working population? With such a gentlemanly vision of world war, it’s not
surprising that BC can still talk hopefully about the proletarian
revolution achieving its victory during and even after the next global
conflict! Or else, by the increased “technical means” and “tempo” of modern
warfare, BC means that World War 3 will begin straight away as a
push-button affair. But if this is the case, then it makes no sense to talk
about the victory either of one bourgeois camp or the proletariat, since the
entire world would have been reduced to rubble.

In fact, it is
practically certain that a third world war would rapidly escalate into a
nuclear holocaust – which is a good reason for not talking glibly about the
proletarian revolution arising during or after the next war. But we agree that
“every bourgeoisie enters a war thinking of victory.” This is why the
bourgeoisie doesn’t want to plunge straight into a nuclear war, why it is
spending billions searching for ways of winning the war without annihilating
everything in the process. The ruling class also knows what the main stakes of
the next war would be: the industrial heartlands of Europe. And it is certainly intelligent enough to
recognise that for the west to occupy eastern Europe, or for Russia to seize
the fleshpots of western Europe, there would have to be a total involvement and
mobilisation of the proletarian masses, whether at the military fronts or at
the point of production, and particularly in Europe itself. But for this to be
a possibility, the bourgeoisie would first have to have ensured not only the
“passivity” of the working class, but its active adherence to the
war-ideologies of its exploiters. And this is precisely what the bourgeoisie
cannot ensure today.

THE HISTORIC RESURGENCE
OF THE PROLETARIAT

In 1982, the text from BC’s
Congress argued that : “if the
proletariat today, faced with the gravity of the crisis and undergoing the
blows of repeated bourgeois attacks, has not yet shown itself able to respond,
this simply means that the long work of the world counter-revolution is still
active in the workers' ’consciousness”; that the proletariat today “is tired and disappointed, though not
definitively beaten.”

BC's most recent text on the subject clearly
marks an advance from this point. For the first time, it states unequivocably
that: “the counter-revolutionary period
following the defeat from within of the October revolution has ended,” and
that “there are no lack of signs of a
revival of class struggle and we do not fail to point them out.”And in fact we have already noted that
the pages of Battaglia have contained a serious coverage of recent
massive class movements in Belgium, France, Yugoslavia, Spain, etc.Nevertheless, the IBRP’s underlying attitude remains one of profound
underestimation of the real depth of the class struggle today, and it is this
above all which renders them incapable of seeing how the proletariat stands as
an obstacle to the war-plans of the bourgeoisie. [1]Battaglia may have noticed some “signs” of a class response in the years
1986-87. But these “signs” are in reality the advanced point of a succession of
international waves going back to the events of May ’68 in France. But when the first of these waves manifested
itself, whether in France ’68 or the ‘hot autumn’ in Italy in ’69, Battaglia
dismissed them as noisy eruptions of the petty bourgeois student strata;
derided the arguments of the ICC’s predecessors about the beginning of a new
period; and then went back to sleep. At its 5th Congress in 1982, it was still
projecting its own tiredness onto the proletariat, despite the fact that there
had already been a second wave of struggles between ’78 and ’81, culminating in
the mass strike in Poland. And, after a brief reflux after 1981, a new
wave began in Belgium in September ’83; but it wasn't until 1986 – i.e. three years into this
third wave – that BC began seeing the “signs” of a class revival. It is
thus hardly surprising that BC finds it so hard to see where the class
movement is going – it has so little idea of where it has come from. Typical of
this blindness even in relation to the past is the statement in the most recent
article that : “after both ’74 and ’79,
the crisis pushed the bourgeoisie into much more serious attacks on the working
class but the much-exalted workers’ combativity did not in fact grow.” The
wave of struggles from ‘78-81 is thus written out of history...

Because it sees today’s
struggles as no more than the first timid beginnings of the class revival,
rather than situating them in an evolving historical dynamic going back nearly
20 years, BC is naturally unable to measure the real maturation of class
consciousness which has been both a product of and an active factor in these
struggles.

Thus when the ICC points
out that the ideologies which capitalism used to mobilise the class for war in
the ‘30s – fascism/anti-fascism, defence of ‘socialist’ Russia, etc. – are now
used up, discredited in the eyes of the workers’ Battaglia asserts that
the bourgeoisie can always find alternatives to Stalinism or the
fascism/anti-fascism campaigns of the ‘30s. But curiously enough, it avoids
telling us which alternatives. If, for example, when it talks about
finding “further obstacles” to Stalinism it means obstacles to the left
of Stalinism, this only proves our case: because whenthe bourgeoisie is forced to put its extreme
left in the front line of opposition to the proletarian threat, this can only
be a reflection of a realprocess of
radicalisation within the class.

The truth is that the
proletariat’s growing disengagement from the main ideologies and institutions
of bourgeois society is a real problem for the ruling class, particularly when
it affects the main organs charged with disciplining the workers : the trade
unions. And at this level, BCseems particularly blind to what has been going on throughout the
working class: “At this pointthe ICC should point out the terms in which
the course they have adopted presents itself: the revival of combativity, the
fall of old myths, the tendency to shake off union shackles... As there are no
real pieces of evidence (for this).... it is necessary to tamper with reality,
exaggerate it, distort it... invent it.”By this token, the increasing tendency to ‘de-unionisation’ (which the
bourgeois press has lamented in numerous countries); the growing number of
strikes which break out spontaneously, ignoring or going beyond union
directives (eg Belgium ’83 and ’86, Denmark ’85, British Telecom, French Rail
strikes, Spanish miners and steel workers, and countless other movements); the
mounting list of examples of workers booing unions speeches, ignoring union
pseudo-actions or alternatively turning them into real class actions; the
appearance of independent and unitary forms of workers’ self-organisation (as
in Rotterdam in ’78, Poland ’80, the French rail strike, the teachers’
struggles in France and Italy...); the emergence of combative nuclei of workers
outside the union structures (Italy, Belgium, France, Britain...) – all these
“pieces of evidence” about “the tendency to shake off union shackles” which the
ICC press has been documenting and publishing for years, all this is a mere
‘invention’ on our part, or at least a ‘distortion’ of reality.

DOES THE CLASS STRUGGLE
AFFECT THE BOURGEOISIE?

If the idea of a
swelling tide of proletarian resistance is a mere invention of the ICC, then it
would follow that the bourgeoisie doesn’t have to take the working class into
consideration when formulating its economic or political strategies. And BC
doesn’t hesitate to draw this conclusion: “There
is not a single policy in political economy in any of the metropolitan
countries (with the possible exception of Poland and Rumania)
which has been modified by the bourgeoisie in the wake of the struggle of the
proletariat or any of its sections.”
If Battaglia is suggesting that the bourgeoisie doesn’t shape its
economic attacks (or its propaganda campaigns, election strategies, etc) in
anticipation of the reactions they will provoke from the workers, then it is
denying an intelligence to the bourgeoisie, a mistake which marxists can
ill-afford to make. Alternatively, it is suggesting that the Polish and
Rumanian bourgeoisies are the most sophisticated in the world! Actually, the
citing of these two cases isn’t accidental, because the Stalinist form of state
capitalism often makes explicit tendencies which are less apparent in the ‘western’
varieties of state capitalism. One might well ask, however, what changes in the
policy of the bourgeoisie BC discerns in Rumania today? As for the modifications in the policy
of the Polish bourgeoisie in order to attack the working class more effectively,
we saw these at work against the class struggle in 1980: false liberalisation,
the use of ‘renovated’ trade unionism a la Solidarnosc, staggering of the
attacks, etc. In other words, the techniques used for decades in the west. The
same ones which Gorbachev wants to generalise throughout his bloc in order to
confront the revival of class struggle. Even the most rigid and brutal
fractions of the bourgeoisie are now being led to modify and adapt their
policies in order to cope with the development of the class struggle.

Furthermore, to argue
that the proletariat, despite all the massive struggles of the last few years,
has not succeeded in pushing back the bourgeoisie’s austerity attacks in any
way is to deny all significance to the defensive struggles of the class.
Logically it would imply arguing that only the immediate struggle for
revolution can defend the workers’ interests. But while in global terms it’s
true that the revolution is the proletariat’s only ultimate defence, it’s also
true that the present struggles of the class on the terrain of economic demands
have both held the bourgeoisie back from making more savage attacks, and have,
in a number of circumstances forced the bourgeoisie to postpone attacks it was
actually trying to impose. The example of Belgium ’86 is particularly significant here, because
it was the real threat of a unification of struggles which obliged the
bourgeoisie to make a temporary retreat.
But the most profound significance of the proletariat’s capacity to push back
the economic attacks of the bourgeoisie is that it also represents the
proletariat’s resistance to capitalism’s war-drive. Because if the ruling class
is unable to compel the workers to acquiesce to ever-increasing sacrifices on
behalf of the national economy, it will be unable to accomplish the
militarisation of labour required for an imperialist war.
For Battaglia, however, the proletariat’s performance is still not up to
scratch. The evidence we give of a growing disengagement from bourgeois
ideology, of a developing combativity and consciousness, everything in fact
“presented by the ICC as ‘proof’ is extremely weak and is insufficient to
characterise an historic course.”

The fact is that for Battaglia,
the only thing that could have any effect on the war drive is the revolution
itself. Our text of 1979 already responded to this argument: “Some groups, likeBattaglia Comunista, consider that the
proletariat’s response to the crisis is insufficient to constitute an obstacle
to the course towards imperialist war. They consider that the struggle must be
of a ‘revolutionary nature’ if it’s really going to counteract this course,
basing their argument on the fact that in 1917-18 only the revolution put an
end to the imperialist war. Their error is to try and transpose a schema which
was correct at the time to a different situation. A proletarian upsurge during
and against a war straight away takes the form of a revolution:

-because society is plunged into
the most extreme form of its crisis, imposing the most terrible sacrifices
onthe workers;

-because the workers in uniform
are already armed;

-because the exceptional measure
(martial law, etc), which are in force make any class confrontation frontal and
violent;

-because the struggle against war
immediately takes on the political form of a confrontation with the state which
is waging the war, without going through the stage of less head-on economic
struggles.

“But the situation is quite different when war
hasn’t yet been declared. In these circumstances, even a limited tendency
towards struggle on a class terrain is enough to jam up the war machine, since:

-imposing even greater sacrifices
on the workers than the ones which provoked their initial response runs the
risk of provoking a proportionally stronger reaction,” (IR 18, The Historic Course’).

To which we can only add
that today, for the first time in history, we are moving towards a generalised
class confrontation provoked not by a war but by a very long drawn-out crisis.
The movement of struggles which is laying the foundation for this confrontation
is consequently itself a long drawn-out one and often seems very unspectacular
compared to the events of 1917-18. Nevertheless, to remain fixated on the
images of the first revolutionary wave and to dismiss today’s struggles as
amounting to very little is the very last way to prepare oneself for the
massive social explosions that lie ahead.

THE ITALIAN FRACTION AND
THE HISTORIC COURSE

The ICC’s approach to
the question of the historic course is based to a large extent on the method of
the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left, whose political activity in the
1930s was founded on a recognition that the defeat of the 1917-23 revolutionary
wave and the onset of the crisis of 1929 had opened up a course towards
imperialist war.

Although the
Internationalist Communist Party also claims a historical continuity with the
Fraction, it has not really assimilated many of its most vital contributions,
and this is particularly true with regard to the question of the historic
course. Thus whereas for us the clarity of the Fraction’s approach to this
position enabled it to make an internationalist response to the events in Spain
in 1936-37, in contrast to nearly all the other proletarian currents from
Trotskyism to the Union Communiste and the Fraction’s own minority, who
succumbed to a greater or lesser extent to the ideology of anti-fascism, Battaglia
is only too keen to seek out the “methodological error” of the Fraction: “The Fraction (especially its EC and in
particular Vercesi) in the ‘30s judged the perspective as being towards war in
an absolute fashion. Did they have reasons to do so? Certainly, the facts in
their entirety gave them reason.But
even then the absolutisation of a ‘course’ led the Fraction to make political
errors... The political error was the liquidation of any possibility of a
revolutionary political intervention in Spain
before the real defeat of the proletariat, with the consequent hardening of the
differences between the minority and majority on a basis which held little
advantage for either of them. The ‘interventionists’ allowed themselves to be
absorbed by the POUM militia only to then be rapidly disillusioned and return
to the Fraction. The majority remained watching and pontificating that : 'There
is nothing to be done’....”

Turning to the ICC
today, Battaglia goes on: “Today,
the ICC’s error is substantially the same, even if its object has been stood on
its head. Absolutisation of the course towards conflict before war; all
attention is turned on this in the ingenuous and irresponsible undervaluation
of what is in front of everyone’s eyes as regards the bourgeois course towards
war.”
This passage is replete with errors. To begin with, BC seems to be
mixing up the notions of the course with that of the tendencies
produced by the crisis. When they accuse us of “absolutising” the course
towards class confrontations they seem to think we are simply denying the
tendency towards war. But what we mean by a course towards class confrontations
is that the tendency towards war– permanent in decadence and aggravated
by the crisis – is obstructed by the counter-tendency towards proletarian
upsurges. Furthermore, this course is neither absolute nor eternal: it can be
reversed by a series of defeats for the class. In fact, simply because the
bourgeoisie is the dominant class in society, a course towards class
confrontations is far more fragile and reversible than a course towards war.
In the second place, BC completely distorts the history of the
Fractions. We can’t here go into details about the complete history of the groups
of the Communist Left [2].
However, a few brief points must be made:

- it is not true that
the majority position was that “there is nothing to be done.” while opposing
any idea of enrolment in the anti-fascist militias, the majority sent a
delegation of comrades to Spain to seek out the possibility of creating a
communist nucleus there, despite the evident danger posed by the Stalinist hit
squads: these comrades narrowly missed being assassinated in Barcelona. At the
same time, outside Spain, the Italian and Belgian Fractions (and also the
Mexican ‘Marxist Workers Group’) issued a number of appeals denouncing the
massacre in Spain and insisting that the best solidarity with the Spanish
workers was for the proletarians in other countries to fight for their own
class demands;

- it is true that, in
the face of the second world war, a tendency crystallised around Vercesi,
denying the “social existence of the proletariat” and rejecting any possibility
of revolutionary activity. It was also true that the Left Fractions in general
were thrown into disarray and inactivity shortly before the outbreak of the
war. But the source of these errors lay precisely in the abandonment of their
previous clarity about the historic course. The theory, articulated in
particular by Vercesi, of a ‘war economy’ that has overcome the crisis of
overproduction, and consequently of all further wars as evidence of an
inter-imperialist solidarity to crush the proletarian danger, resulted in the
disappearance of the review Bilan and the publication of Octobre
on anticipation of a new revolutionary upsurge. This left the Fractions
completely disarmed on the eve of the war: far from ‘fixating all attention on
the war’ at this point, as BC claims, Octobre saw the occupation
of Czechoslovakia and the Munich agreement as desperate attempts to forestall
the revolution!

- it should be said that
this radical revision of the Fraction’s previous analyses was opposed by a
significant minority within the organisation. Some of the most articulate
spokesmen of this minority were silenced by ­­­­the Nazi death-camps. But in
France this position was maintained throughout the war; and it is not
accidental that the same comrades who insisted on the necessity to carry on
with the communist activity during the war were also able to resist the
activist turn provoked by the proletarian movements in Italy in 1943, when the
majority of the comrades of the Italian Left – including Vercesi – mistakenly
saw a new 1917 and decided that the time had come to form the Party. The
Internationalist Communist Party is the direct heir of this error of
method;

- in this context it is
also worth pointing out that the ‘interventionist’ minority did not return to
the Fraction as BC claims. They returned to the Union Communiste, which stood
half way between the communist left and Trotskyism. And after 1943 they
returned... to the Internationalist Communist Party. No doubt they felt at home
within an organisation whose ambiguities concerning the partisan formations in Italy were virtually identical to their own
ambiguities towards the anti-fascist militias in Spain... [3]­­­­­

THE DANGER FACING
BATTAGLIA

As we have seen, the
origins of Battaglia themselves lie in a mistaken analysis of the
historic course. The precipitous formation of the ICP during WW2 resulted in an
abandonment of the clarity attained by Bilan on many issues,
particularly the problem of fraction, party and historic course. These errors
have reached their most caricatured form in the ‘Bordigist’ current which split
from the Battaglia current in 1952, but it is extremely difficult for the
latter to overcome all the remaining ambiguities without calling its own
origins into question.
In its recent article BC claims that the ICC’s errors in method, its
deformations of reality, have led to splits and will result in more. But the
truth is that the ICC’s prognoses have been proved consistently correct ever since
1968. We were the first to reaffirm the reappearance of the historic crisis in
the late ‘60s. We have seen our predictions about the development of the class
struggle confirmed by the various waves which have taken place since then. And,
despite all the scoffings and incomprehensions in the political milieu, it is
becoming more and more obvious that the ‘left in opposition’ is indeed
the essential political strategy of the bourgeoisie in this period. This is not
to deny that we have made mistakes or suffered splits. But with a framework of
analysis that is basically sound, in a period full of possibilities for
revolutionary work, mistakes can be corrected and splits can result in overall
political strengthening of the organisation.
The danger facing Battaglia is of a different order. Since it is so
historically bound up with a false analysis if the historic course, since it is
tied to a number of obsolete political conceptions, it runs the risk that the
apparent ‘homogeneity’ it displays today will give way to a series of
explosions brought about by the insistent pressure of the class struggle, by
the growing contradiction between its analyses and the reality of the class
struggle.

Whether Battaglia
like it or not, we are heading towards immense class conflagrations. Those
currents who are not prepared for them are in danger of being swept aside by
the heat of the blast.

MU

[1]We are talking on a general level here. At
certain moments – and in total contradiction to the article we’ re responding
to here - Battaglia even go so
far as to lend support to the thesis that capitalism must first silence the
proletariat before being able to go to war. Thus in the same issue of Battaglia
as this article, we can read an article ‘Let’s Reaffirm some Truths about the Class
Struggle’ which says: “let us reaffirm to
the point of boredom to the workers that not to fight against the sacrifices
imposed by the bourgeoisie amounts to allowing the bourgeoisieto enlarge the social peace required as a
prelude to the third imperialist war.” (our emphasis).